Napthalis by Tobias Hill

'The people of Amathus, in revenge for his having laid siege to their town, severed the head from the dead body of Onesilus and hung it up above their gates. In time it became hollow, and was occupied by a swarm of bees, who filled it with honeycomb.' Herodotus, The Histories

Monday finds him early at his station, squatting on his haunches on the corner outside Barclays Bank, eating hand-me-downs from McDonald's, then unfolding long shanks, pocketed hands, and a skull losing hair as if someone in love has stroked him there more often than the stuff of him can bear,

and so comes to a standstill, his back flat to the thronged house of the moneylenders, the first words already poised on his lips, the rest of them gathering up inside, until he lifts his bandaged megaphone and opens up his teeth to let them out.

THOSE WHO COME TO FIND THE LORD - Napthalis says through a plague of static - THOSE WHO WAIT TO LOOK FOR HIM ONLY AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR WILL DIE AT TEN THIRTY, Napthalis says,

though the English rain has again begun its interrupted centuries of fall and no one stops to listen, though some look back at him with surreptitious spite,

the man with the golden bee in his bonnet, the figure in the knitted cap and parka with God lodged like a dove in his mind, and a curse on the house of each commuter: sharp as splinters lodged in careless hands are his offerings, his diatribes.

Not even a smile on a girl assuages him. But the days are long, and evenings find him murmuring the spirituals that his aunts taught him, the old women with ermine eyes, tough as yardfowl, their mingled voices sour-sweet as the juice of June plum,

and faint, so that they come to him now only as visitations in his dreams; Dara, with the dozen rings, Maud, who sometimes read to him

when he was a boy in a town called Rest in a house on the river on the green island he hasn't seen in forty-seven years and won't see again now before Heaven.

DO NOT HURRY INTO ETERNITY he says with rationed fire and brimstone to the overstanding gentleman who stops to give him a toll of change but should know better than to go

yarding through the rain like a madman, sneezing all the way like a dog barking - all teeth - to reach Iceland by closing time,

the newspaperman across the road a balancing muezzin, when Napthalis starts to hum again, Isaiah a sweet venom on his tongue, though the rain from the north stings his face,

and the sky is leaded with more to come, or with the dark of the world that waits to fall, Napthalis thinks, though he knows

that in Cricklewood on a Monday night nothing is fit to bear the weight of being anything more than it seems,

and just as Napthalis is just Napthalis, so the darkness that surrounds him is nothing more or less than darkness.